Banking ‘development’: the geopolitical–economy of infrastructure financing

Abstract

In the post-2008 global economy, infrastructure development and financing have risen to the top of the development agenda, emerging as a contested field for global investments involving seemingly divergent interests, objectives, rationalities and practices. Whereas multilateral development banks such as the World Bank advocate the market-based public-private partnership aimed at attracting private finance and deepening marketized governance, China is forging a state-capitalist alternative through its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). These models are far from mutually exclusive. Through a conjunctural approach, the paper examines the broader trade and financial interdependencies in which these models are entangled, and the geopolitical-economic objectives enframing the emergent infrastructure regime. These are explored vis-à-vis Indonesian infrastructure projects, framed by competition between China and Japan.

State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime

“…Third, the return to spatial planning strategies has had a strong geoeconomic and geopolitical dimension (Anguelov 2020 ; Kanai and Schindler 2019 ). In what Kanai and Schindler ( 2019 ) call the “infrastructure scramble”, states and private actors compete to redesign territories by financing, constructing, and controlling large‐scale infrastructure in the developing world.…”

“…State Capitalism and the New Global D/development Regime We locate the source of contemporary state capitalism in the variegated ways in which states have politically mediated these five transformations and their crisis tendencies, which often involved scaling-up their roles as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital, resulting in highly diverse institutional landscapes and configurations of state-capital relations across the world capitalist economy. Importantly, the resulting state capitalist trajectories are fraught with political tensions and enmeshed in geoeconomic and geopolitical constellations and forcefields (Alami et al 2021).…”

21st‐century transnational real estate development: What, where, who, how and why?

“…To be more precise, the increased assertiveness of emerging economies such as China in terms of global aid and development has significantly impacted urban development practices within its expanding sphere of influence. As a response to China's state‐capitalist alternative and its recent establishment of new large‐scale transnational projects and developmental institutions, other countries are gradually shifting their development approaches as well (Anguelov, 2020; Shannon, 2019a, 2019b). While some TREDs are more directly connected with this new development approach than others (as indicated by the tables in the next section), they are collectively illustrative of how transnational businesses in the 21st century are being conducted and how this impacts contemporary urban development in many parts of the world.…”

The world’s number 1 real estate development exporter? Assessing announced transnational projects from the United Arab Emirates between 2003–2014

“…This increase in geo-entrepreneurialism, an arena in which entrepreneurial activities are driven by geopolitical and geo-economic motivations that co-exist alongside one another, is accelerated by the recent economic rise of developmentalist and state-led capitalist countries, as well as their subsequent geographic expansion, often operated through either state-owned (SOEs) or government-related enterprises (GREs) (see also Alami and Dixon, 2020;Cowen and Smith, 2009;Doucette and Park, 2018;Kim and Grey, 2016;Shannon, 2019). Many infrastructural and real estate development projects that fall under the umbrella of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) can also be seen in this regard (notwithstanding its own variegated characteristics; see Anguelov, 2021;Liu, Schindler and Liu, 2020;Moser, 2018;Power and Mohan, 2010;Shepard, 2017;Wiig and Silver, 2019).…”